For a young Jewish scholar and writer named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him \u2014 all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge.<\/p>\n
Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m always reading,\u201d Uminer, 31, said. \u201cI\u2019m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.\u201d<\/p>\n
He worked as a freelance Hebrew translator and used the apartment as the headquarters for his fledgling literary journal, Notarikon Review<\/a>, hosting parties that gained a reputation among quarters of New York\u2019s literary<\/a> underclass. Striving writers drank beer among the teetering stacks while arguing over foreign affairs and Greek poetry.<\/p>\n The stacks kept rising as Uminer added his hauls from thrift shops, book dealers and eBay deliveries. \u201cI don\u2019t think of myself as a hoarder,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I guess my building did.\u201d<\/p>\n This past winter, he received a notice from building management. \u201cYou are violating a substantial obligation of your tenancy,\u201d it began. \u201cYou are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books in the Premises.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI open this letter,\u201d Uminer recalled, \u201cand they\u2019re telling me my books are a fire hazard, that I have to be out if I don\u2019t get rid of them.\u201d<\/p>\n After he did not heed the warning, eviction proceedings began. He decided to fight back in court.<\/p>\n One afternoon last month, Uminer stood amid the leaning towers, savoring his unruly paradise while he still could. As klezmer music played from his phone, he ran his hand across the spines of \u201cThe Russian Theater after Stalin\u201d and \u201cThe Kurdish Question in Iraq.\u201d He tenderly held up a book of poems by Abraham Reisen<\/a>, a Yiddish writer he was smitten with.<\/p>\n \u201cSure, maybe I\u2019m a little bit different,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I know my library might seem excessive to some. But it\u2019s not as excessive as people might think. In a rabbinic household, no one would blink twice at a library like mine. Reading is part of my culture.\u201d<\/p>\n He descended the building\u2019s opulent staircase and lit up a Marlboro on the sidewalk.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought I\u2019d found peace here, that I\u2019d start my magazine here,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll need to stop growing my library for a while. But I feel I always need to be learning, because that\u2019s what I think I have to offer the world.\u201d<\/p>\n A Precocious Scholar<\/p>\n Raised in a Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights<\/a>, Mendel grew up speaking Yiddish with his grandparents, listening to the teachings of his bearded Lubavitcher rabbi uncles and attending troika dances in banquet halls. His father, a pious real estate broker named Isaac, relished studying the Torah with him. But the boy craved literature. At 12, he was reading Dostoyevsky.<\/p>\n In his teens, Uminer attended rabbinical seminary, where he embraced Talmudic<\/a> study. Lessons began at 7 a.m. and ended with nights of vodka-fueled argument with the rabbis.<\/p>\n \u201cMy days were spent studying texts in Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish, and I sometimes went a whole year without seeing a woman\u2019s face, but I was also disobedient and incorrigible,\u201d he said. \u201cI was always reading what I wanted to read, not only what they wanted me to read. But that\u2019s where you assert yourself. Where you form your opinions. Where you make your own sense of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf I form an opinion, and there are books saying the opposite, I need to read them all, to know if I\u2019m justified,\u201d he continued. \u201cIf I\u2019m not convinced, I should let my conviction go.\u201d<\/p>\n In his early 20s, as he grew engrossed in Ovid and Rousseau, he befriended writers<\/a> at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village and found himself browsing more at the Strand than at the Judaica emporiums of south Brooklyn. One year before his ordination, he turned away from the path set out for him.<\/p>\n \u201cIt dawned on me I wasn\u2019t as much of a true believer as I thought I was,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe it upset my grandparents, but I decided I should just go do what I wanted to do, which was enter the modern liberal cultural society of New York. I didn\u2019t want to be drunk on medieval piety anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n His mother, Dina Uminer, said she wasn\u2019t surprised by his secular turn. \u201cIt tracked with the curious boy he always was,\u201d she said. \u201cEven when he was little, he would try to convince us of things through argument. A little bit of knowledge was never enough for him.\u201d<\/p>\n After putting away his kipa, Uminer enrolled at Columbia University to study film and philosophy. Outside the classroom, he interned at Tablet magazine<\/a>. After graduating at 27, he met a young woman from Paris. He soon ventured to her home city, where the romance came to an end.<\/p>\n \u201cShe kicked me out of her apartment, but I stayed in Paris until I spent my last dollar,\u201d Uminer said. \u201cI smoked Gitanes in the Marais. I got robbed in the subway. They had the best politics journals and literary magazines. Paris changed me.\u201d<\/p>\n He spent hours at the book stands along the Seine. Reading journals like Nouvelle Revue Fran\u00e7aise and Connaissance des Arts, he found his vocation.<\/p>\n \u201cThese French journals had people making arguments<\/a> in ways that really mattered,\u201d he said. \u201cSo much of our writing here is about, \u2018You must choose a lane.\u2019 Theirs has a comfort with controversy, a precision in argument, a sense of historic consciousness, that we need more of.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in New York, Uminer decided to start a publication of his own, Notarikon Review<\/a>, an eclectic journal that will \u201cpublish people who don\u2019t agree on everything,\u201d he said. Some of the writers he has recruited are former social media adversaries. The debut print issue, scheduled to come out later this year, will include fiction by Julia Kornberg, an essay by Hayley Jean Clark about the artist Anna Weyant and a translation of a Yiddish short story by Abraham Reisen. Uminer conducted his first editorial meeting, over pizza and beer, on the floor of his Upper East Side studio.<\/p>\n On a recent afternoon, he went browsing at the Mizrahi Bookstore<\/a> in Marine Park, Brooklyn. When he entered the aisles packed with ancient Jewish texts and leather-bound Torahs, the store\u2019s owner, Israel Mizrahi, warmly greeted him as \u201cMendy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think Jews have an almost mystical relationship with books and knowledge,\u201d Mizrahi said. \u201cWe\u2019re always reliving our past, creating a thirst for knowledge, which is why a Jewish home needs a library. But Mendy\u2019s insatiable curiosity stands out from all my customers. He understands that physical books are the only way we can truly retain knowledge. I\u2019ve seen him spend three hours here in random conversation with someone about the kinds of horses used by 18th-century Polish Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n He had heard about Uminer\u2019s apartment troubles.<\/p>\n \u201cOf all the vices, I find books to be the least dangerous,\u201d Mizrahi said. \u201cI think it\u2019s possible his landlord might have their priorities misplaced, or might not understand him. If you\u2019re not steeped in his culture, maybe his library does look chaotic. But I\u2019d argue it only looks like a mess. I\u2019ll bet he can tell you where every single book is in his apartment.\u201d<\/p>\n The Move<\/p>\n After months of slow legal jousting, Uminer finally resigned himself to moving out of 6 East 65th Street, which is owned by the Hakim Organization, a company founded by the New York real estate magnate<\/a> Kamran Hakim.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to be here if I\u2019m not wanted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The Hakim Organization and the building\u2019s management company did not reply to requests for comment.<\/p>\n On a hot Friday, a few friends arrived to help Uminer with the move. They tamed the heaps and towers of books into neat piles that could be placed into boxes.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy has God cursed us with this heat?\u201d Uminer said.<\/p>\n \u201cGod doesn\u2019t curse us, Mendel, we curse ourselves,\u201d replied Julian Cosma, a filmmaker.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I didn\u2019t mean it in the Spinozistic sense. I just meant, it\u2019s a hot day for moving.\u201d<\/p>\n While Uminer took a smoke break, Cosma heaved books into boxes.<\/p>\n \u201cIt makes sense to me that Mendel, a Brooklyn yeshiva kid, would come to the Upper East Side and make this world for himself here, only to get rejected from it,\u201d Cosma said. \u201cThere\u2019s a New York now, keyed into professionalism and uniformity, that sees a guy like him and thinks something must be wrong. There\u2019s an element to the city now that\u2019s hostile to the life of the mind, to the eccentricity that might produce it.\u201d<\/p>\n More friends stopped by. As they disassembled the library, the walls grew more and more unobscured. Finally, it was time to take the boxes to the van outside. The sky darkened, and a hard rain began to fall.<\/p>\n Wearing shorts and Tevas, Uminer led the charge, dashing into the downpour with a box of medieval Italian plays. His friends followed, getting soaked as they deposited their hauls into the vehicle.<\/p>\n